1 – Denial – The Denial stage includes feelings of shock, numbness, and disbelief. When change first realized, some people have a hard time believing “this is really happening.”

2 – Anger – Anger can be expressed in a variety of ways. Anger at your co-workers, towards family members, at God for letting this happen at the worst time. The anger can even be expressed towards yourself for letting you be put in this situation.

3 – Bargaining – Taking actions that you believe will prevent or minimize the effect of the change will have on you personally. This can begin even before the change is formally introduced.

4 – Depression – A level of depression can set in if one feels helpless. If you feel that you have no choice but to accept the change then a natural reaction is some form of sadness that could reach the level of depression.

5 – Acceptance – The experience of “depression” is what leads to “acceptance”. Some people think that “acceptance” means we are “cured” or “all right” with the change. But this isn’t the case at all. Acceptance simply means we are ready to try the new changes and move on. This allows us to accommodate ourselves to this new way of doing things in a manageable fashion.

Business Domain understanding is created by mapping the current terrain and identifying the critical areas of change. Business processes are organized into related areas. When a company decides to make a transformation it is generally due to a break down in these processes. The key to understanding the challenges that a business faces is an understanding of the difference between a successful process and a failing one.

Client Trust is earned through taking the time to … Understand the “What”: The Business Arena … Before Trying to Fix the “How”: The Business Process

Sometimes we believe we have a “Better Way of Doing Things” before we truly understand what the “Thing” really entails

Dr. John Kotter has been coaching big companies for over twenty years using an 8 Step transformation process to ease the pain of change with human beings: Step 1: Establishing a Sense of Urgency

Help others see the need for change and they will be convinced of the importance of acting immediately.

Step 2: Creating the Guiding Coalition

Assemble a group with enough power to lead the change effort, and encourage the group to work as a team.Step 3: Developing a Change Vision

Create a vision to help direct the change effort, and develop strategies for achieving that vision.Step 4: Communicating the Vision for Buy-in

Make sure as many as possible understand and accept the vision and the strategy.Step 5: Empowering Broad-based Action

Remove obstacles to change, change systems or structures that seriously undermine the vision, and encourage risk-taking and nontraditional ideas, activities, and actions.Step 6: Generating Short-term Wins

Plan for achievements that can easily be made visible, follow-through with those achievements and recognize and reward employees who were involved.

Step 7: Never Letting Up

Use increased credibility to change systems, structures, and policies that don’t fit the vision, also hire, promote, and develop employees who can implement the vision, and finally reinvigorate the process with new projects, themes, and change agents.Step 8: Incorporating Changes into the Culture

Articulate the connections between the new behaviors and organizational success, and develop the means to ensure leadership development and succession.

Business Transformation has a serious effect on the human resource topography.

Positions could become obsolete and many new resource requirements will be required.

Every effort should be made to transfer existing resources to newly required positions whenever possible through formal and informal training initiatives.

This will mitigated environmental issues by fostering a climate of trust that management appreciates the time in service of the legacy resources.

A strong commitment to continuous communication of the changes as they are discovered with all levels of company resources is essential to earn “Trust Equity” with the employee base.

Posting Clear and Understandable Justification for Change

… Detailing the Benefits Employees will gain from Change

A formal training program ahead of the implemented changes to help relieve the fear and stress of corporate change is required.

A Companies Most Important Resource
are its Human Beings: Respect the Individual!

An elastic design with regards to business requirements ensures that the most important design decisions are made late in the delivery process as possible.

As we move through the business transformation evolutionary process we gain more knowledge that we can use for wiser decisions that impact the success of the business transformation.

By delaying important decisions that impact the overall design of the Technology Domain we enable a design to adapt to the changes created from the implementation of those late delivery processes.

When discussing Technology in the scope of Elastic design I am actually referring to the network infrastructure hardware, operating systems and application software requirements for a deployed solution.

There are basically two ways to support a solution deployment:

1 – Corporate supported Network Operating Centers (NOC)

2 – Cloud Services

There are pros and cons to both.

Corporate Supported Network Operating Center

PROs

1. Company retains full control and access of all infrastructure assets
2. Security concerns regarding Authorization and Authentication are managed internally
3. All environmental configurations, specifications and schemas are under corporate control
4. Total control of the network availability and contingency management process

CONs

1. 24/7 support responsibilities
2. All logistics support requirements for the NOC
3. Capital expense requirements for all network devices and appliances
4. All applications, tools and supporting software must be procured
5. Full bandwidth and servicing power costs at all times even when not required
6. Ownership and management of all support personnel

Cloud Services

PROs

1. Outsourced 24/7 support responsibilities
2. Create platforms as required
3. License applications only as required
4. Scale environments dynamically as needed
5. Shut down bandwidth in slow periods
6. Pay as you go opportunities
7. Cost forecasting becomes simpler
8. Environments can be created and destroyed without direct interactions
9. All backup and redundancy schema are well-tested and validated

CONs

1. Offsite storage of proprietary data and applications
2. Shared control of the Security concerns
3. Limited direct access to any physical resources
4. Shared management processes for your environments
5. Loss of some business tax exceptions for environmental costs

Ultimately the elastic design of your system is based on many decisions.

A phased approach to moving from one environment to the other is recommended so metrics can be created to validate the perceived return on investment.

There are 100 ways to do most things

… But only a handful of ways to do them correctly

…… There is no “One Way” for anything

It is a fact that creating technology solutions takes time, sometimes a great deal of time.

The latency between the business requirements gathering and the final deployment of the product to market can be years.

We live in a rapidly change and diverse world market that seems to change almost daily.

This begs the question:

“How can we deploy solutions that are not
obsolete on the day of deployment?”

What is a Semantic Design?

A “Semantic” is representation of a noun, not the noun itself. As stated earlier in this article, the definition of a semantic:

“Linguistics relating to meaning or the differences
between meanings of words or symbols”

If we analyze any business vertical, an industry sector, we can generally define the essential business requirements through a representation of nouns. A company that delivers a created product to a customer defines the following Semantics:

1. Vendors – Suppliers for their inventory
2. Inventory – Items required to create and deliver their products to their customers
3. Product – Manufacturing or construction of a product for delivery to the customer
4. Orders – Processing and fulfillment of customer product requests
5. Delivery – The acquisition process by which a customer receives the requested product
6. Customer – The initiator of the Order and the receiver of the delivered product

These are representations to a business domain that could support any of the following business models:

1. Pizza – Pickup or delivery of ordered pizza
2. Burgers – Pickup or delivery of ordered hamburgers and other sandwiches
3. Videos – Internet streaming of ordered video media
4. Music – Internet streaming of ordered music audio and video media
5. Working Lunches – Office delivery of working lunch orders

To better understand the concept of a semantic let’s look at ten concrete entities that could be represented from a “People” semantic:

1. Customers – People that buy available products from a company
2. Vendors – People that supply companies with their inventory items
3. Employees – People that receive company benefits such as health care insurance
4. Dependents – People that receive company benefits from a family member’s company
5. Contractors – People that deliver services to other people or companies
   
6. Clients – People that receive services from companies company
7. Colleagues – People that work with other people company
8. Constituents – People that are represented by politicians in a designated geographical area
9. Lobbyists – People that tries to influence legislation on behalf of a special interest
10. Politicians – People who actively engage in the use of tactics and strategy to gain power

When a business solution is designed to the semantics that define the required business process and not to a concrete implementation of that process at any point in space and time, we can define the process as set requirements specifically relevant to that point in space and time

We can manage the changing implementation details that will occur over time by not creating a solution architecture that is based on requirements that have been defined as a one to one concrete implementation during the design phase of a business process.

…By Designing to the Semantics of the Business Domain
…… And Creating Self-descriptive Definitions of the Semantics
… We can Deliver these Mappings for the Semantics
…… Dynamically when the Concrete Representations are Required

In technology we can deliver to the managing application a “Dictionary of Defined Terms” that represents what the application requires at that point in time.

As the definitions change we only need to modify the Dictionary of Defined Terms to change the realized results.

A design that conforms to this paradigm become “Atemporal”,
timeless in nature and is freed from the constraint
of the early requirements that change over time

The Ubiquitous Language is a collection of Business Terms that must be understood and realized in the same way by all Team Members.

The lexicon is a “Living Dictionary” that must be pro actively managed throughout the entire Software Development Life Cycle.

The Software Development process requires numerous human beings to become intimately involved for the project for the initiative to be successful.

Each member of the Business Group and the Solution Provider’s team has a unique perspective of the project and the definition of any term that the member hears.

As stated in the Modern Developer Blog “The Cat Dilemma”, a misunderstanding of terms deemed as understood by the development team can lead to complete failure of the Client’s definition of success.

The Ubiquitous Language

… Is a Lexicon of Terms

…… Created for a Better Understanding of the Business Intent

The terms are always driven by the Business Domain requirements and augmented by the Architecture

The Lexicon is made globally available to the Business and Technology teams for reference and maintenance throughout the entire life cycle of the Business initiative.

The Goal is to create the Dictionary of Terms
from translated words and phrases
that are refined in to a Ubiquitous Language
that all Business and Team members
agree upon the common meanings